R and Data Science Webinar

Recently, I had the opportunity to present a webinar on R and Data Science. The challenge with attempting this sort of thing is to say something interesting that does justice to the subject while being suitable for an audience that may include both experienced R users and curious beginners. The approach I settled on had three parts. I decided to:

show a few slides that indicate the status of R among data scientists

offer some thoughts as to why R is such a popular and effective tool

work through some code.

The "why" slides attempt to convey the great number of machine learning and statistical algorithms available in R, the visualization capabilities, the richness of the R programming language and its many tools for data manipulation. I tried to emphasize the great amount of effort that the R community continues to make in order to integrate R with other languages and computing platforms, and to scale R to handle massive data sets on Hadoop and other big data platforms.

The code examples presented in the webinar emphasize the machine learning algorithms oganized in the caret package and the many tools available for working through the predictive modeling process such as functions for searching through the parameter space of a model, performing cross validation, comparing models etc. The code for the caret examples is available here.

Towards the end of the webinar I show the code for running a large Tweedie model with Revolution Analytics rxGlm() function and I also show what it looks like to run an rxLogit() model directly on Hadoop.

Click on video to view the webinar, or go to the Revolution Analytics' website to download the webinar and a pdf of the slides. All of the code is available on my GitHub repository.